[migpwr]

I apologize for the off-topic comment but I am hoping a few of the folks on here who are familiar with Hadoop can help me with a small career decision.

I'm fortunate enough to be up for two systems positions with companies in my area, and one of them is part of a group maintaining a Hadoop cluster. I've never maintained Hadoop infrastructure before so I'm wondering if it's worth the "career capital" investment. There don't appear to be too many openings that I know of for Hadoop Sys admins, and while I don't expect to lose any skills working on it, I wonder if this platform is realistically expected to grow, and maybe become something I could maybe build a valuable niche set of skills for...

Any help would be appreciated...

[oacgnol]

I would say go for it. Hadoop is becoming more of a norm in industry and I can tell you from personal experience that having prior hands-on Hadoop work makes your resume pop a little more.

Even better is if you're able to muck around in core Hadoop versus abstracted management layers like Cloudera. The things you have to learn in maintaining a Hadoop cluster like cloud systems management, tuning, running jobs, etc. makes for valuable experience, even if niche.

[daviddumenil]

Definitely the right direction:

http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/hadoop.do

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/255142/idc_exp...

http://www.mckinsey.com/Insights/MGI/Research/Technology_and...

Although I'd second the point that getting your hands dirty with the Hadoop core is likely more valuable than straight sysadmin work.

[throwaway1979]

I don't see exploding demand in this. However, the experience will likely translate over to other domains and make you better for it. I'm not a sys admin but setup a small hadoop cluster ... but wow ... talk about learning experiences!